Investigations are being made on identification of living bodies including individual persons. Some methods and apparatuses for identification of an individual person conduct the identification by utilizing a physical feature of the individual person such as a fingerprint, a voiceprint, a voice, and a retina. Such an identification apparatus, which utilizes only a characteristic pattern of the specified feature of the person, has problems in security, since another person can obtain and imitate the pattern data. Actually, a second person can simply cut out the physical characteristic portion from a first person and can pretend to be the first person.
To cancel the above disadvantage, methods and apparatuses for identification of the individual person have been disclosed as shown below.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2001-195364 discloses combination of two or more identification systems such as retina identification, fingerprint identification, voice identification, and voiceprint identification to improve real-time responsiveness (quick identification of the objective person to be true) for security.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-236666 employs additional system for checking the quality of the biological information such as a fingerprint, a voiceprint, a face feature, and an iris to improve real-time detectableness in the identification for security. The information-quality-checking system is exemplified by a temperature sensor, a skin electroconductivity tester, and an image pickup apparatus for observation of movement of a mouth or an iris.
The method of using plural kinds of individual identification systems, like the method disclose in the above Japanese Patent application Laid-Open No. 2001-195364, requires combination of many individual identification systems for real-time individual identification. However, use of the plural identification systems necessarily makes larger the system constitution of the identification apparatus disadvantageously. Further, the use of the plural systems for individual identification can be ineffective if a second person imitates all the objective physical data of the individual identification apparatus. Thus, even if this method can increase the probability for the precise identification of an individual person, it is difficult to prevent completely the false pretension.
The method of additional use of an information-quality-checking system for securing the real-time responsiveness of the individual identification system, like the method of above Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-236666 can improve greatly the real-time responsiveness. However, the system is necessarily larger corresponding to the information-quality-checking system, disadvantageously.
Any of the above disclosures improves the real-time responsiveness to prevent pretension to be the subject person for higher security. However, for the real-time responsiveness, plural identification systems should be employed, or an information-checking system should be added, which enlarges the entire identification system. In particular, in recent years, mobile products such as a mobile phone have come to be widely used. The individual identification apparatus for reservation systems, cashing systems, and the like employing the mobile product are naturally demanded to be smaller in size.